Entry level implies no experience. If I applied for a position in brain surgery, I would apply for an entry-level position. I've never done that before, but how hard can it be?

I want to answer "No" there and see if they have a bias for or against applicants who are exactly 49 years old.

I was born in the 70s and consider myself a "digital native". All computers I have used have been binary based, for example. All in fact based on transistors. I showed my son a picture of me at his age sitting in front of a TRS-80 and my much beloved Commodore 64 and you know what he said? He said "Wow Dad, you had computers!". Indeed, not only did I have them, but he recognized them as such.

I guess my point is that I'm not sure the term "digital native" has any actual meaning, or at least such meaning will have to be proven in court. Was I turned down because I wasn't "digital native" enough? Or was I turned down because I was too old?

Most of us have one monopoly, or the other monopoly, and we switch between them depending on how crappy one currently is versus how crappy we remember the other being. Both are usually crappy, and there is no true escape.

So I voted 3-10 years because that's how long I've lived here and had one monopoly or the other.

Pretty much right on. Given how much of Silicon Valley is moving to my neighborhood just so they can afford to eat AND own a house at the same time, I'm not really that convinced that the important parts of technology will remain in SV...just the VCs.

When I was in that situation, programmers, engineers, developers - whatever the title was - had a cap of salary. Meaning your senior architect god's gift to the technical couldn't go above a low level manager's salary. If you wanted more, you gotta go management. And what sucked, many times you topped out at your company, but your pay was waayy above every other company's.

This is pretty much why the Peter Principle exists. We have a bizarre notion that management is somehow "better" or "above" technical work, when in many cases managers are in the job they do because they are not actually good at doing technical work, but they are good at the big picture and knowing where resources need to be spent. Similarly technical people, who are usually more concerned with the problem than the solution, often feel they need to jump to management but are not good at that work and do not want to leave the technical work. So you end up with a lot of unqualified positions they don't truly want to be in, but need the money.

I have been doing this for a while now, I'm still not convinced even one very good manager is worth more than one very good engineer, nor are they harder to find if you don't create a reality via pay grades. My present company perhaps encourages people to stay technical, and we have a few people who would be strong managers who are staying technical because that's where the money is at while the managers have far too much risk of being fired. But most of my previous employers were the opposite: good engineers who got promoted up because they were good engineers, but had no particular managerial talent. HR created the reality where you promote them, or watch them leave. So they got promoted.

Maintain an extra fleet of vehicles which need to be maintained and insured, at some % utilization. I'm not really sure this saves money.

In 15 years and 4 companies I have had 9 different CEOs, that's what makes me say that. None of them believably retired or voluntarily stepped down, and only one or two was an obvious crook. By comparison in 15 years and 4 companies I've had 6 supervisors, only one of whom left the company but in her case she really did retire.

I am not defending what upper management does, they do what I'd do, only they have more power to do it. I personally consider Wall St. the big enemy, not upper management.

A) What were you doing you could be replaced that easily?!

Everyone is expendable, from the CEO to the janitor. That's not evil that's just running a good business. Anyone who tries to make himself indispensable is the first person you try to replace, it's not a good behavior and it's not good for anyone.

B) Companies can drop you any time, out of nowhere. Keep some savings, and keep skills up so that if you need another job, you can find one... it's really easy at larger companies to drift into something that lasts years, if not endlessly. Don't let such things trap you.

Yes, that's always good advice. However in this case it should not have happened but for screwed up laws and indentured servitude. If these people were replaced with other citizens or residents who were believably competing on wages, then generally I agree.

Value is entirely based on perception.

Wall Street is entirely based on perception. I can point to very few stocks that one should buy based on them being a good deal for actual value of the company. Just buy/sell and hope you're not the top of the pyramid.

Absolutely untrue. For a fresh Windows 7 install, generally I would agree. But for anyhting over a month old the UI performs miserably, redraws poorly and is generally as bad as Gnome 2.0. And that's just UI performance. It still lacks a proper shell environment without installing 3rd party hacks, is a total memory whore and doesn't scale well with load.

I seem to recall that we went through this in the mid to late 90s, where the government insisted any use of strong cryptography should as a matter of law, have a backdoor for the government. Then suddenly they dropped it, and all of us paying attention knew they got their way by some other means. Now post-Snowden, I guess we know what that was, and they're back to beating this horse all over again.

The answer should be no, with absolutely no further discussion.

Distilling your comment into non-irate hate, my environment is 3 widescreen displays, side by side. Presently I have 13 terminals, 1 "heavy" text editor, two VNC sesions and chrome. I have similar environments on Gnome at home, and KDE at work (minus chrome).

In terms of objectivity:
- I have more usable screen space for me & my apps than I do in Gnome (no backdoor configuration, but a few mainstream mods), significantly more than KDE (running in those VNC sessions). I never bother with Unity anymore.
- In terms of performance, I can drag windows around and do not wait for redraw once. When I drag a window the contents do not disappear, nor do they stop updating (why should they?), they simply move where my mouse puts them and continue playing video or scrolling text or whatever as they move. Gnome is second best. With 13 terminals open that does happen from time to time, but thanks to the magic of Spectacle I can usually avoid the mouse for simple operations. While I rarely sit at KDE directly, it was the worst performer when I last had it installed on my desktop. It works second best to OS X with VNC however. Gnome is terrible in that regard.
- In terms of memory usage, in OS X it is hard to say for certain but "kernel task" is at 1.8GB, which certainly includes non OS things. No other task at this moment is above 600M. So let's call it 1.8GB. Gnome-shell is using 2.2GB, with only one chrome and one terminal open. The particularly old KDE implementation that comes on the company install of RHEL defeated my ability to gauge memory usage, it would appear to be around 500MB.
- I'm not going to debate the facets of the X windowing system and where you feel the problem is, I don't care. I'm not an X developer and will not ever be. It's a package I install, I don't want to spend more than an hour or two configuring it. I understand that Gnome and KDE encompass a lot more than pixels, again that's not relevant for most users. To most of us it's pixels and if it doesn't work the way we want, we throw it out entirely.

While I am an engineer and spend all day with various X's, write a lot of code, stare at a lot of waveforms, and run a lot of heavyweight processes, I don't understand why any sensible person would not want their window system to be smooth and responsive. First and foremost the machines that I use a windowing system are for me to interact with, I should be the priority. When it comes to heavy processing, I have machines that have absolutely no UI on that do the heavy lifting and parallel processing. If I *do* heavy processing on the machine with my window system, the UI needs to get priority, it is a desktop and interactive first and foremost. I'm not sure, beyond a few users with very specific needs, why anyone would not want that behavior out of the box. I've tried XFCE, and didn't like it. I haven't yet tried Mate/Cinnamon.

I do want a good Linux solution it is my preferred OS and religion, but I find that once Canonical gave up the helm in favor of Unity, that Linux returned to it's native state of infighting and bullshit. It is still superior to Windows by lightyears, but there's no reason why the windowing systems continue to resemble angry squirrels wrestling in a canvas sack. I don't know what level of neck beardery suggests that you would prefer to have a sluggish, unresponsive windowing system, or why that helps you with coding or productivity related tasks, but it interferes with mine and my use case seems to resemble what you describe.

KDE tends to be common "at work" if you have compute farms or whatever for design/engineering tools on RHEL/CentOS. Gnome tends to be more common "at home" for running your favorite distribution. Probably most people have Unity and never change it, but I still find it to be highly dysfunctional and intolerable.

They all have their ups and downs, OS X still has the best & most responsive UI on top of a *nix. It's not entirely clear why Linux can't do that better, at the very least make a much less "heavy" UI that is responsive and smooth. Except that everyone involved seems to be more focused on reinventing the desktop environment to work on tablets which very few people really care about.

Even with proprietary nVidia drivers and a very big video card, Gnome and Unity both seem to have the same handicap as Windows with regards to how the screen is drawn and updated such that you always get this "chugging" effect when you move stuff around. I have no idea why they obsess about icons and open/close buttons when the most important part isn't right.

No, while I agree with the sentiment, the key lesson they have failed and perhaps the single most important one: don't get caught. Clearly the professor is correct, these students have not demonstrated mastery of the material and need to retake the course.